I have recently been reading Principles of Economics, which I highly recommend. This got me thinking about how our monetary system works, which I will summarize here. If you don't have time to read this, just look at this graph of money in circulation in Canada. Just this one graph will help you understand why housing and the stock market keep going up.
That black line was made with the equation

e^(unixTime * 2.5*10^-9 + 9.98)

That has an R-Squared of 0.9942, so it fits very closely to the actual money in circulation.
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Something I have wanted to do since I learned about McCabe-Thiele diagrams, is make a program that generates them automatically. Thanks to pyplot, I have been able to do that. I made diagrams for common separations below. For those not familiar, these diagrams are a method of estimating the number of trays required in a fractionation tower. I don’t think they would find much use now that computers can accurately simulate an entire tower using an equation of state. They are still great for understanding what is going on inside the tower. It is also great for estimating where the feed should enter the tower. Several diagrams would likely be created during the design phase (remember this was developed in the 1920s), with different reflux ratios, and different tray counts. Then a graph of tray count cost plus reflux cost vs number of trays would be created, and that is how the designers would come up with the number of trays required in the tower.

If you have ever wanted a search engine for your own files, now you can have it, thanks to a few open source projects. This project will use Elasticsearch, and FSCrawler to provide the search function, and the file indexing. FSCrawler uses Tesseract for text recognition. For the front end, I was initially thinking of making my own php/html, but that would become very complicated in order to deal with the file permissions (to have any application layer security). If you just have internally used files that are shared among everyone on the LAN, then a simple search interface would work great. If you have multiple users with personal files, then ownCloud is the way to go. ownCloud is a ready made platform, that has all of the application security implemented, as well as a search function (and alot of other great features). I modified ownCloud to use the elastic search index for searches. This add’s text recognition from images, and massively speeds up the searches (takes less time than a search on your favorite commercial search engine). I will add that what I have done is very simple, and it could use improvements. I wouldn’t recommend this in a large environment, because something will probably not work, and people will be upset at you.

In the Inductive Automation videos/manuals, they mention using a database solution to replicate your data. To do that, you could use a managed database service, such as AWSRDS. Or if you want the database to be local, then I will explain one method of replicating the data between two servers. I’m not going to go into the details of how this works, this is more of a reference to get it up and running quickly.